Its November 4 launch date is fast approaching, but Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfaredeveloper Infinity Ward is still applying changes to the game’s multiplayer component.

Following the game’s beta earlier this month, the studio has spoked about some changes it’s making to the game after player feedback. These changes are said to be ready and in place by the time the game launches later this week.

As expected, many of the game’s weapons will be getting tweaked, as is often the case in Call Of Duty games, with annual developers constantly changing, nerfing and beefing weapons in response to how the community uses them.

Shotguns will see some pretty significant changes, with damage and damage range both being increased. The one-shot-kill range will also get a boost, while the Reaver and Banshee will get boosts for their one-triller pull kill range.

Snipers, unsurprisingly, are also getting some major changes. Bullet spread at the hip won’t get smaller once the player ADS’s. Bullet spread will drop to zero as soon as the scope reaches the player’s eye. Sniper aim assist has been reduced for the KBS Longbow, while the turn rate while ADS has been slowed to help with precision aiming. Sniper-class weapons will no longer have Aim Assist unless the optic fully reaches the player’s eye.

It doesn’t end there: for the ELO and Scout optics on snipers, the idle sway while in ADS has been increased, as has the player’s view bounce when moving. The developer says these changes will encourage players to remain stationary while aiming and firing with these specific optics. The track chip optic’s visuals have also been improved, while the reduced bonus of the Quickdraw attached on snipers should please many a player who was involved in the beta. Snipers will also flinch more when shot.

Some changes have also been made to Launchers and SMGs. The Howitzer Grenade Launcher can be fired from the hip, which wasn’t possible in the beta, while the RPR Evo epic variant (Ripper) SMG has had a tuning pass to increase recoil considering its bonus fire rate.

Slight decrease in both time to the initial drop and the time between each subsequent drop

Updated area damage to be consistent inner to outer

Rigs

Refining payload balance

Slight tweaks to gameplay balance across rigs

MODES

Defender: When carrying the Drone, the score-per-second bonus has been bumped from 5 score per second to 10 score per second. Scorestreak carrier bonus is unaffected.

Gun Game: Now features all classic weapons. In future updates, weapons with alternate functions will retain their state upon spawn.

Domination: When you step off a flag, the current capture bar progress starts to decay. The rate of this decay has been halved from the Beta. This allows players to hop off a flag to defend it and then get back on the flag with less progress loss

MATCHMAKING

Potential player evaluation was too strict. We were doing some very thorough testing of your connection to other players before placing you in a lobby with those players. This turned out to be a bit too thorough, and eventually was relaxed, leading to shorter matching times.

Incorrect geographic categorization. There was an issue in our geolocation system which was causing some players to be incorrectly categorized. This was also resolved during the beta, improving matchmaking times.

Dead lobby cleanup. The process which cleans up unused or dead lobby information from our back end was taking too long. This was causing a number of slowdowns when searching for a match.

The matchmaker was always quite good at generating new lobbies, but one thing we noticed was that queueing into a join in progress situation was taking much longer. This was due to some issues in the way we track information about the lobbies that are currently playing a match. These issues were also addressed during the beta, and sped up the join in progress case immensely.

We know a lot of you had different experiences with TTK during the Beta. With the above adjustments to dedicated servers, matchmaking, and weapon tuning, we think you’ll find that the TTK will be more balanced at launch, both on the attacking and receiving end. We’ll continue to monitor and balance throughout the year as need and would love your feedback in the process.

We’re always looking at TTK and will continue to balance and monitor

DEDICATED SERVERS

One of the major infrastructure changes we made this project was how dedicated server allocations work. We’re using a new load balancing system on the servers themselves, as well as pretty heavily changed how the game chooses a datacenter to use, and requests a dedicated server from that datacenter.

At the start of the Beta, you may have noticed some host migrations and some poorer quality matches. We discovered some issues where the new system was dropping our dedicated server utilization numbers way below target. After some tweaks and fixes we were able dramatically improve our dedicated server utilization for the second weekend and beyond.

Gaetano Prestia Editor in Chief

Gaetano loves Doritos and always orders Mountain Dew with his KFC. He's not sorry. He also likes Call Of Duty, but would much rather play Civ. He hates losing at FIFA, and his pet hate is people who recline their seat on short-haul flights.